If you haven’t read the sidebar in a while, or at all, you may not know that I’m a 17 year-old who’s just finished their high school education, and is starting their undergraduate university degree this year. This puts me in a bit of a unique situation – I’ve been blogging on Homologous Legs since April 2008, when I was in Year 11 and was 16 years old (my birthday is in March, if you’re confused). This made me an extremely young science blogger at the time. It’s rare to see 16 year-olds blogging about serious topics like science, religion and skepticism – most of the little blogging that does happen at that age is focused on the private life of the blogger, ala. Livejournal.
So when Bora, from A Blog Around the Clock (over on ScienceBlogs – ooh, respect is oozing out of my young student pores), wrote about young science bloggers, I was intrigued. He talked about some recent projects by science educators at the university level that have tried to incorporate blogging into teaching plans – the main one being Mason Posner (he blogs at A Fish Eye View) who gets his senior students to start blogging about science in teams in order to help their science communication skills.
Now, the blogs of Posner’s students don’t seem to last much past the end of the course – which got Bora asking the question: “Why did they stop?” A good question, and one that many a person decided to have a go at answering. Below are two of the more notable responses.
Arikia Millikan thinks that the reason that young people don’t blog is due to visibility and they don’t want to have a blog on the Internet that could affect their chances of landing a job in the future.
Mason Posner himself weighed in with his thoughts – he’s found, through experience with his students that young bloggers need community, and will stop blogging if not enough people comment on what they’ve written.
My own experience with blogging, unlike Posner’s students, has been completely voluntary. I came into the world of blogging after going to the Australian Biology Olympiad Science Summer School in 2008 and coming back revitalised about evolutionary biology, genetics and biology in general. I had been refuting the claims of creationists for over a year before that point on YouTube and listening to the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcast, so I felt it was natural to start a blog about it all.
At first, I blogged because I felt that eventually I would become a well-respected member of the skeptical blogging community if I just kept it up and slowly raised my profile. Yes, to start with all I cared about was, in a way, the “fame” aspect of having a blog that lots of people read. After spending a bit of time in the blogosphere, I began to notice that there were a ton of blogs around, some of which had serious thematic and general content overlaps with Homologous Legs. This lead me to realise that if I just continued to blog with the vague intent of becoming well-read, producing the type of content that a lot of popular blogs seemed to produce, I wasn’t going to succeed at my goal, and this would lead to a disenchantment with the concept of blogging. I had to find a good reason to continue with my blog – I was investing quite a bit of time into writing about topics that only a few people wanted to read about. Why continue?
The answer came when I got into the Discovery Institute’s many blogs – I realised that the misinformation that ID proponents and creationists put out onto the Internet wasn’t being challenged in a way that would allow for laypeople searching on search engines about those topics to find significant scientific responses to them. I decided to continue blogging because I felt that they needed at least one more voice out there that they could stumble upon to find out the truth about what these people were telling them.
Clearly, this blog has turned into a little more than that – I don’t just focus on breaking down creationist articles, I also comment on skeptical topics and others things as well – but that was what kept me going when I felt like giving up.
For me, unlike Posner’s student bloggers, I never felt disenchanted by the lack of large amounts of comments on my posts – the content I was producing would rarely spark any debate amongst people that were on my side of the skeptical coin, and my target audience wasn’t expected to comment back: they were just looking for opposing views, that’s all. And I have never felt that I would be put off blogging if a future employer saw Homologous Legs – I rarely post personal things on here, and when I do they are ludicrously tame to the point of being pointless. In fact, I feel that it could at the very least increase my chances of being employed, given that the employer was a research lab and wanted someone with enthusiasm about evolutionary biology/genetics.
But this is just my view. I know I’m a unique case – very rarely do young science bloggers blog in order to help perpetuate good information about little-understood areas of knowledge in the general population. Without the drive that I found I had, I can easily envision them becoming bored with the prospects of writing about topics that they feel nobody cares about. Thus, I have to agree with the message that Bora exuded in his most recent blog post on the topic of young bloggers: “Go and comment.”
Young bloggers need motivation! They might be enthusiastic about the topics they write about, but they’ll stop writing if they don’t think anyone cares. Site hits may tell you how many people are visiting your blog, but comments will tell you how many people are reading your blog. Blog communities need to spring up around young bloggers – each of them needs to feel that they have an important role in the community, perhaps they’re the person people turn to for particle physics news, rainforest news or geology news, etc. They need to motivate each other through continual feedback – either mentions in their own blogs or comments on their posts.
You can thank Kylie Sturgess for this – she forced me to use my newfound scientific journal access (oh yes, I’m in the game, finally) to search for educational research into student blogging, and I came up with a couple of papers which were relevant, and they seem to back up what people have been saying on this topic. Both were studies on real student blogging models at the university level.
Derntl, 2009 found:
Our simplified blogging activity model reveals a simple yet effective spot that can be used by instructors / facilitators to spark and sustain blogging activity: “comments posted” is the only variable within the student community that is actually under co-control by instructors. From the student point of view, this effect is less obvious, since the blog portal does not reveal who commented on an entry; it merely shows how many comments were posted, which is anonymous until the blog entry is actually visited. So keeping external factors constant, the easiest way to facilitate bloggers would be to make inspiring comments to their blog entries.
Ellison, et al., 2008 found:
This preliminary finding regarding the peer-to-peer learning potential of blogging needs further study, and should be confirmed by empirical evidence of learning. What is interesting is that explicit feedback on one’s entry was not considered as useful as the implicit feedback about one’s ideas found in others’ blog entries—implicit in that we can assume students are comparing their ideas to others. Additionally writing one’s own entry, which would appear to be the critical component of the assignment, was seen to be less helpful than reading others’ entries. This may be because students are benefiting from the diverse perspectives provided by their peers as opposed to the initial act of documenting their ideas.
So, it seems pretty clear – student bloggers need a community of comments and mentions in order to stay focused on their task of science communication. Let’s hope we can all find the student blogs before they decide to close down. Actually, Bora provided a very good list of young science bloggers in this post (me included), so, er, go and comment.
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References:
Derntl, M. (2009). Understanding and Facilitating Student Bloggers: Towards a Blogging Activity Model Advances in Web Based Learning – ICWL 2009, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg. Volume 5686/2009: 140-149.
Ellison, N. and Y. Wu (2008). “Blogging in the Classroom: A Preliminary Exploration of Student Attitudes and Impact on Comprehension.” Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia 17(1): 99-122.
It is great that you're blogging. I'm impressed by your writing and style. I do understand about the frustration of writing and not getting feedback. I have done a lot of blogging, and it seems that only the occasional post brings in regular comments. It is as if people were afraid to write in. I also think that reading blogs is a bit like watching the TV news for most people – they put their minds in "passive" mode and don't think about their mental response. Hence they have nothing to say
Keep up the great work! (and, as I get my second top-secret book project underway, I look forward to discussing/debating some of the scientific concepts you touch on here in your blog)
Thank you!
Ooh, top-secret, eh? I wonder what those topics could be…
Excellent blog. I'm in my 50s and still learning.
well young whipper snapper, you evaded the generation of facebook fear. I hope you and your friends have learned from our mistakes. Keep it up
'y welcome.
Just a comment – how many find the Young Australian Skeptics site a great way to get posts out?
I think people that don't have blogs like to post there to get something out that they otherwise wouldn't, and people that already have blogs (such as myself and others) like to cross-post there for the extra audience it produces.
But we do need more writers… I'm not sure we push the whole "You can actually write for us, you know?" message hard enough. I, personally, would like to see more writers my age (16-19) contributing to the YAS, but all we seem to end up with are 20+ year olds (not we don't want them, they're great, but some younger people would be nice too).
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Young bloggers need motivation! They might be enthusiastic about the topics they write about, but they’ll stop writing if they don’t think anyone cares.
Extend this out to the geriatrics as well
Blog communities need to spring up around young bloggers – each of them needs to feel that they have an important role in the community, perhaps they’re the person people turn to for particle physics news, rainforest news or geology news, etc.
I know what you are getting at here, but I think it may be better worded as young bloggers need to create community, or become a valued part of larger one. Do you think we need to develop a separate blogging community or just encourage young bloggers better ? When you are talking about science and you have the knowledge why does age matter?
Jack, quite frankly your grasp of science far outstrips mine, I would be coming to you for help in understanding biology. You are part of the skeptical community.
You also have the YAS, which has a good profile. Maybe you need to talking about some initiatives that they can run with ie programs to help develop young science/skeptical bloggers, training in podcasting, interviewing, etc.
Perhaps a survey is in order
"Extend this out to the geriatrics as well
"
Yes, of course. :p
"I know what you are getting at here, but I think it may be better worded as young bloggers need to create community, or become a valued part of larger one."
I agree, but I think it might be easier for a community, built by the young bloggers themselves, to be created, than for them to become embedded in the larger science community as a whole. There are lots of blogs in that community, and it's easy to get drowned out by people who might have more experience and readers than you. Blogs are very easy to ignore/never find.
Once that is in place, blogs can rise out of this community as they age and become professional scientists/science communicators and contribute more notably to the science blogging community as a whole. Maybe.
"Do you think we need to develop a separate blogging community or just encourage young bloggers better?"
I think encouragement builds a community well, if a lot of the encouragement is coming from peers (ie. other young bloggers). This should be stressed to young bloggers who are new to the "game" – and older bloggers should spend a bit of time commenting on these new blogs with links and suggestions about other young bloggers, in order to forge relationships between them early.
"When you are talking about science and you have the knowledge why does age matter?"
It doesn't, but younger bloggers don't have the automatic "authority" that, say, a professional scientist might. Thus, they need to have readers guided to them. I doubt that there isn't a subconscious bias against younger bloggers in the mind of the average reader – most of them think, on some level, that what they're saying isn't that important. But that's false, young people and older people alike can come up with great ideas or novel ways of communicating scientific principles to the public and each other. All bloggers should be respected for what they write (so long as it's not utter crap :p).
"Jack, quite frankly your grasp of science far outstrips mine, I would be coming to you for help in understanding biology. You are part of the skeptical community."
I realise that, but after how long? Many a young blogger might give up before they reached my stage – I was lucky in that I had a separate driving force to blog other than wanting others in the community to read what I've written.
"You also have the YAS, which has a good profile. Maybe you need to talking about some initiatives that they can run with ie programs to help develop young science/skeptical bloggers, training in podcasting, interviewing, etc"
That's a good idea! I think we should stress the fact that the YAS allows ANYONE to blog there, and it has the potential to turn into a huge group blog for younger skeptics. I really need to get onto that with the others at the YAS – that could be a great thing to do.
Oh, and interviewing young bloggers could be a good thing as well… I'll think about that for Season 2 of the Pseudo Scientists…
"Perhaps a survey is in order
"
What do you mean by that? A survey of YAS readers, or my readers?
Good on your Jack. You're proof that maturity and intelligence has nothing to do with something as arbitrary as age.
Well, I'm sure age has something to do with maturity, but it's not necessary for it. Young people can still be rather immature – don't let my actions make you think otherwise.
Then again, who said I was mature? :p
Thanks for commenting.
Thought I better write a comment so you don't get discouraged.
I agree with Sean, it's not just young bloggers that appreciate feedback in the way of comments on their blog. I haven't been writing on my blog for ages, but my reasons are: real life getting in the way, lack of drive and motivation, wasting too much time on twitter
I have occasionally gone to write a post on a certain topic, only to find several others already have, this has discouraged me from bothering covering that same topic. Has this problem been looked into as a possible reason why people stop blogging? I could imagine this problem might be greater for young people who see themselves as less qualified than the older more experienced bloggers?
I know I don't blog about certain news items or Discovery Institute activities because someone like PZ Myers has already done it, so I think that they're little point – he says it far better than I could, and about 10,000 times more people read his blog than mine.
I'm sure it could be a factor, especially for younger bloggers who'd like to take on the big topics, but since most young science bloggers only really write about 1. science news items/new research, and 2. their thoughts on a timeless question that isn't linked to a specific news event, then I'm not sure it would affect them as much as a blogger who is far more "reactionary" with their writing, ie. atheist bloggers, skeptical blogger, people who "debunk" thinks that others have said.
I suppose it's all about finding a niche, as well as writing about big topics before the popular bloggers do (in the hope that they may link to you instead of writing something about it themselves).
Just to echo all the other comments from my fellow oldies … yeah … me too. Motivation is a real factor, along with the sense that you're kind of shouting into the wind sometimes.
You're definitely on the right track, Jack, finding a niche activity to focus on like Disco-Tute-Debunking.
I should try to find some kind of focus myself. For me, the gaps between blogs are getting wider!